Zombie Highways

Time was we worried about Chief Falling Rock when we took to the highways in my dad’s sedan. It was politically incorrect family slang for falling rock. On our family excursions along highways en route to the Smoky Mountains, the roadside signage warned of falling rock in the area. Chain link fence along the interstate heightened the sensation that a boulder could come sailing into the passenger window at any moment.

"Chief Falling Rock is after us," my dad would warn. A few years ago I took this acoustic memory and used it as the opener for a short story about a family portrait.

Times have changed a bit. Today there’s new terror on the roads. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer warned tonight of Zombie Highways. The story was about the Appalachian Development System gone too far in building a road to nowhere in north Birmingham. I saw some zombies on the interstate this summer, but the kind of zombies I saw were a little different than Jim’s.

If I had a quarter for every person talking on a cell phone while driving on the interstate, I could have made it to Austin and back without using my credit card once. Throw in a dollar for every mom (with kids in car seats) merging onto the highway while texting and I’ll make a contribution to your favorite charity.

We need laws to get people to quit taking undue risk.

How does that legislation get enacted? It seems soon after airbags began showing up in automobiles, I was witness to an autopsy at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Kentucky where a woman, under the height of 5’4’’, did not walk away from her accident because she suffered injuries when her airbag deployed on I-64. I don’t remember the exact role the ME’s office took in bringing about legislation to warn consumers that people under a certain height were at risk of airbag deployment injury, but I know there was some communication between Louisville and Frankfort on the issue.

There are plenty of people who argue government is too big, government does not need to take our freedoms away. If people made judicious use of capitalistic pleasures like phones with keyboards, maybe we wouldn’t need so many laws. Trouble is most people never want to think of safety until someone has hurt them.

While we’re in Mexico at the summit, we need to remember that we don’t want eighteen wheelers from Mexico on the interstate with the yellow HISD buses. Yes, let’s quit sending guns into Mexico for the drug cartels but no, we are not ready to allow Mexican trucks without brake inspections on US highways while my family is on the road.

Too much free trade and texting is bad for our safety on the roads. Darwin awards are for suicide, not homicide.

(This post was written last week and deemed too negative for the blog. Nonetheless, so many people have talked about dangerous road texting in the past four days that I felt compelled to post today.)